


covered in teeth marks

by touchydynamite



Series: dog teeth [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Backstory, Blood, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Canon Non-Binary Character, Character Study, Codependency, Introspection, Mental Health Issues, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Teeth Removal, Other, POV Second Person, Smoking, Trauma, Unreliable Narrator, Vampires, Whump, commentary on the nouveau riche, graphic depictions of queen anne architecture, lower case, poc narrator, unhealthy polycule
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26758270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/touchydynamite/pseuds/touchydynamite
Summary: and you're not entirely sure when you got so distant from yourself that you stopped caring about your own thoughts.
Relationships: Original Male Character(s)/Original Non-Binary Character(s)
Series: dog teeth [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949425
Kudos: 1





	covered in teeth marks

**Author's Note:**

> tw: abusive relationship dynamics - i cannot fucking stress this enough. if you get squicked out by unethical dentistry, maybe avoid this one. 
> 
> this is backstory for the antagonist of a novel about punk vampire hunters i'm attempting to write, and i thought i'd post it to light a fire under my ass to actually get some writing done. so enjoy my stream of consciousness bullshit i guess lmao. title taken from nicole dollanganger's 'dog teeth'.

and you're not entirely sure when you got so distant from yourself that you stopped caring about your own thoughts. 

in the trickles of moonlight seeping through the huge, glittering windows - french windows, bay windows, a ledge with plants off to one side, haphazard and messy and fractal. you killed the woman who used to own this place. not because she did anything to offend you, but just because she was alive, and you aren't - you hold your cigarette between your long fingers. out of all of your features, you've always liked your hands: bony, slim, bordering on skeletal. no matter how much you change, no matter how much blood ends up spattered on your palms, sticky and drying tacky-brown, they always look the same under the moon. 

the rest of you is replaceable. sometimes, you don't know if it's really you, in the mirror. same brown eyes, same dark hair, same brown skin, same sharp jagged cheekbones, but whoever used to live in your body isn't you now. that person, snappy and witty and bright and a coiled spring, disappeared with all of that lost time. 

and you know that you were alive, during that lost time - at least, you were active. in the traditional sense, you were dead: no heartbeat, no air in your lungs, you're not sure about electrical activity in the brain but you'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't show up, if you were given that kind of test. part of you was active in the world. part of you even got married, to a man named isaiah washington, circa 1982. two years spent in bliss, curled up around each other, before you woke up and everything fell apart because you couldn't play at someone else's life. 

recently, you haven't been losing time - not in a way you notice, anyway. some days, you'll wake up in places you don't expect (the backyards of billionaires; gay bar doorways; surrounded by money and coke and blood;) but you check the calendar and it will've only have been a few hours, as opposed to a few years. 

you wonder, sometimes, if that part of yourself, the part that found isaiah and burrowed so deeply under his skin that he fell in love with it, if that part is still there, trying to crawl back to the normalcy it so pain-stakingly built for itself. it'll never get to. that could be a tragedy. you don't know how to make that judgement call. 

taking a long drag on the cigarette - they're the dead woman's, bitter and expensive and scraping down the back of your throat - you exhale smoke at her fancy windows. you moved past the idea of people being deserving or undeserving of death years ago (the moment you stopped being human; you killed a pair of loved-up newlyweds because it was a bad night and you were feeling cruel, feeling malicious, and when the blood sprayed over your jaw you didn't feel righteous or fulfilled, you felt numb and blurry at the edges and you lost a week as your mind shattered into fragments), so her death doesn't weigh on you. according to the photos hanging in her stairway, she seems to be a grandmother, swarmed by a cloud of children wherever she goes. she wrapped herself in moth-eaten cashmere and plays at royalty. it's very nouveau-riche. she has the house to match, 1920s queen anne architecture, all spindle work and eaves and a bright blue facade. 

the nouveau riche wear their tackiness as a badge of honour, and this woman was nothing if not tacky. her name was eleanor diamond, and you know that she has to have changed her surname, because no one's name fits that well the first time around. 

inside, the house is cluttered, chaotic, rooms thrown together, a patchwork of aesthetic incoherence that makes crossing the threshold from one room into another a disorienting experience. there's an alarming amount of leopard print and pink upholstery, like a dolly parton impersonator and a stripper threw up simultaneously. it's charming, but the interior design equivalent of sensory overload. 

you sit on her large, imposing windowsill, covered in fabric and blankets and scraps of paper and dog hair, though you haven't had to kill a dog, so you assume it isn't the late ms. diamond's. at the thought, you snort to yourself - your humanity didn't end with those newlyweds (the newlyweds you thought you'd never forget the name of but you have; the wife had blue eyes; they were trying for a baby; she smelled of hope and bliss and you wanted to tear her to shreds so you did;), it ended when glibly considering snapping a labradoodle's neck became a part of your average day. 

well, no. you take another drag. it's more complicated than that. nothing in your life can make that much sense. you've lived too long for simplicity. all the different strands of the life you've lived and the death you've lived can't tie together neatly. 

another drag, longer than it has to be. your lungs can't rot any more than the rest of you can. 

(rubbing at your arm, you know the maggots squirming under your skin aren't real, but you know they're as real as you are, sliding in your veins and writhing, there, feeding on where you decay.)

your humanity truly, truly ended - the human inside you threw the towel in, the last gasp of the old you - when He called you into his study, toward the end of 1907. bold, brave, smirking, you stepped out of the bedroom, last morning's cum and blood drying to a paste on your inner thighs, and you thought you could take over the world. a dead man hung from a hook in the living room, a tube dangling from his arm into a bucket. there was the plink-plink-drip of liquid, as what was left of him drained away. 

mary was sitting on one of the couches, vivid purple bruises under her eyes, and art sat on the carpet, chin on mary's knee. idly, mary petted her blonde hair. as a snapshot, it’s so peaceful.

it makes you want to vomit up your entrails. 

it's strange, what you remember about that hour. the smell of the dead man's cologne. the flecks of blood on the glass ashtray. the way the sky was just turning from evening to night, dusky purple rather than pitch black and spotted with stars. a light breeze, catching on the vase of roses they kept because art thought it made them look cultured.

you went through the living room - mary looked at you in that way she always did, a little down her nose but not maliciously. she was regal, rather than patronising. there was something in her eyes, though, something you didn't notice then but you know you would now. warning signs are neon, in hindsight. 

"He wants you." she said, toneless. 

and so, you went through. 

without a word, He pulled you onto His lap, where you were always comfortable and it was _you love me, don't you?_ and of course you did. of course you did of course you did of course you did. gentle, He petted your hair, stroked through the strands, so gentle and so loving and you relaxed into the touch, and then it was _if you love me_ \- and it always becomes if you love me. love has to be contingent. it can't exist without conditions. with your huge moon-eyes and the smiles you just shared with each other, you said _anything_ and He smiled and took a pair of pliers from His ornate, ostentatious fucking desk, that fucking desk He'd fucked you on a thousand times, that fucking desk He'd Turned you on. 

_if you love me. i want you to belong to me. i want you to always carry my scars._

you let him. you let him, because you were naive, and innocent, and pathetic. 

He pulled up your lip. He opened the pliers. He closed them around your right fang. i want you to depend on me. i want you to exist as a property of me. there was a crunching sound like a clap of thunder and you know that you wanted to scream but the sound couldn't quite scrape its way free of your throat, and He gently, gently petted your hair, and you leaned into the touch so it wouldn't hurt as much. 

He took his time. of course He did. 

twisting, twisting, twisting it free, like a child with their first loose tooth, poking and prodding and pulling until it started to come away at the root, strings of it still threaded through your gums. the pain came in sharp, sparking bursts. your mouth filled with blood. you swallowed it. it felt like swallowing bile. 

pulling. pulling. 

and then one great, final wrench, and your tooth came away with a spurt of blood and a stab of pain and you let yourself whine and mash your face into His shoulder, smearing red all over His suit. with the back of His hands, with His bony, spindly, blood covered hands ( _will these hands ne'er be clean_ and His never would be and now yours never will be) He pulled you away from him, and slowly, slowly gently pressed His lips against yours. He drank your blood from your mouth, lathed over the hole He slashed. 

that was when you stopped being human. you snub your cigarette on the sill and watch it burn a mark in the wood. 

you're not sure when you got so distant from yourself that you stopped looking yourself in the eye when you glanced at windows.


End file.
